Although prolifers reject this opinion because of its exclusion of the unborn from the class of protectable human beings, most prolifers, like most Americans, rarely understand why many scholars, including abortion-choice supporters, consider Roe to be a badly reasoned opinion......
Blackmun’s second reason is just flat out wrong. His analysis of state abortion laws was based almost exclusively on two law review articles written by Cyril Means, an attorney for the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL). These articles, along with Blackmun’s use of them, have come under trenchant and withering criticisms in an astonishingly large number of academic periodicals in the past four decades.James S. Witherspoon wrote what is perhaps the most thorough scholarly article that addresses Blackmun’s account of these state laws. After an extensive analysis of the nineteenth-century passage of these statutes, their legislative histories, and the political climate in which they were passed, he concludes: “[T]hat the primary purpose of the nineteenth-century antiabortion statutes was to protect the lives of unborn children is clearly shown by the terms of the statutes themselves.”
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